Tattoo you – The Movie Filter

When 93 innocents at a youth camp on Norway’s Utoeya Island were slaughtered last summer by a deranged gunman, the tragedy peeled off the seemingly placid surface of a Scandinavian world whose dark side had been largely overlooked. One man. Nearly 100 dead. Couldn’t someone have done something?

One activist who stared the oft-buried sins of his homeland in the eye is dead, too. Now he is more famous than ever.

On Nov. 9, 2004, the elevator inside the Stockholm headquarters of anti-racism magazine Expo malfunctioned, forcing 50-year-old investigative journalist Stieg Larsson to ascend seven flights to his office. With what friends have described as a health-neglecting lifestyle, fueled with two packs a day, fast food, copious cups of coffee and very little sleep, Larsson suffered a heart attack and collapsed shortly after the climb.

Larsson had been staying up all night for months writing semi-autobiographical crime novels designed to do what his investigative pieces were taking far too long to accomplish: reveal the ugly side of a Scandinavian paradise. Inspired by the regret he had carried since, as a teenager, he witnessed a gruesome gang rape and failed to intervene, Larsson saw his novels as more than mere pet projects. They were his apology, his passion and his penance.

The future best-selling author left three unpublished manuscripts. The first, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is divided into four parts, each beginning with a statistic about sex-related crimes in his native country.

His message was clear. Crack Scandinavia’s pacific sheen, and below boils a cauldron of perversion. Meet a Goth-shrouded hacker, and her harshness is vulnerability made manifest as self-defense. In the age of autism scares, Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander is an anti-hero with Asperger’s. Her beauty is a hidden beauty. Her pain is ours laid bare.

“One day my pain will mark you,” sings freshly minted indie icon Justin Vernon, celebrated for his vulnerable vocals, and like Salander, announcing his wound as a weapon.

Be they fears of four more years of Obamanomics or a Rick Perry White House—David Fincher’s new Dragon Tattoo adaptation is a film that embraces the mass anxiety that stamped 2011 for many Americans. Like his anti-commercialism epic Fight Club, the movie stands as a bleak call to action. It feeds our need for confronting complex social issues on a spoon of pop culture candy.

“The feel-bad movie of Christmas,” the tagline brazenly proposes.

Larsson died climbing, still fighting literally for his work, but he remained haunted by his teenaged cowardice. Dragon’s Blomkvist is the journalist Larsson always wanted to be, navigating a Sweden he could only wish was not so.

According to a recent Rassmussen Report, 75% of Americans polled feel our country is going in the wrong direction. If we are to be bystanders by choice or by force, at least we, in mass, will read about those who are not. Blomkvist is the man Larsson aspired to be, and Salander is the emboldened victim he hoped that unfortunate woman became. Forever altered by tragedy, together they face horror and refuse to back down.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens Dec. 21.